Sacred Beasts - early TOSOTW

[Wellesnet]

Before THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, Orson Welles planned THE SACRED BEASTS.
Examining script fragments, Nicolas Ciccone looks at the crucial differences.
https://www.wellesnet.com/sacred-beasts-lost-other-side-wind/

[Le Chiffre]

Great job, Nicolas, very informative! If you or anyone else comes across a more specific date for these screenplay drafts, let us know.

[nickleschichoney]

I have to confess that I made a grave error at the beginning of this essay. I had it in my head that the original version, set in Spain, was about a bullfight enthusiast, not a film director. But as Welles clearly, explicitly says in the 1963 Maysles film, Sacred Beasts is and always was about a film director. I apologize for the mistake.

Welles also says in the film that he is trying to do something different, something that hasn't been done in cinema before: "What I'm going to do is get the actors in every situation, tell them what has happened up to this moment, who they are, and I believe they will find what is true and inevitable from what I've said. ... We're going to make this picture as though it were a documentary. The actors are going to be improvising." In the Maysles featurette, Welles notes that there are filmmakers in France that are trying to make similar innovations in cinema. In another few years, the US would have its own revolutionary filmmakers via the New Hollywood. Indeed, independent filmmaker John Cassavetes was well-known for an actor-dependent approach to filmmaking similar to the one Welles outlines in the Maysles film. (Perhaps this explains why Cassavetes is featured as a party guest in the scripts of Other Wind.)

Thanks to Massimiliano Studer, I also obtained relevant scans of Esteve Riambau's book Orson Welles: Una España Immortal, though I have not gotten ahold of Cobos's book, which has a more thorough analysis of the fragments from The Sacred Beasts/Monsters. Some of these were featured in a 1964 edition of the Spanish Film Magazine Film Ideal. Quoting Marc Maurette, Riambau notes that initially, Welles had Anthony Perkins in mind for the part of the Dale character, then called Dale Traver (p. 119). He then thought of casting Keith Baxter in the part (p. 122). This character would become Dale John and then James/John Dale as the script was rewritten.

In these fragments, the Hemingway-meets-John Ford character Jake Hannaford is in the process of editing a film called Barracuda while spending time in Spain during bullfighting season. Welles named the character "Jake" after a similar character in a play much-derided by Callow, The Unthinking Lobster, thinking it would be a good luck charm (p. 120). In Riambau's set of fragments, Jake is surrounded by American friends as well as reporters and biographers. A young bullfighter "who had triumphed as a film actor" (p. 119), Dale is Hannaford's leading actor in the film. The film is left abandoned when Dale dies under mysterious circumstances, when only one scene remains to be shot. A prologue states, much like the final version, that there has been a presumed suicide by car accident, but it is Dale, not Hannaford, who is killed. The prologue says (and this is translated from English to Spanish back into English -- pp. 119-120):

Dale was not killed in the ring.
He escaped from the hospital the same night he received the goring - the same night he died - in a car accident.
But it wasn’t an accident.
It was suicide.
It was something worse: murder.
We know that:
Dale is dead;
that for a short time, it was very important
that he received a goring from a bull in that small square;
that he was not a bullfighter, but a film actor;
that he might have been a suicide, that it is likely
that the bull did not kill him, but having been gored he died (by suicide?) that same night.

As Welles said in the Maysles film, his project is ultimately about the "love of death", so no matter how free the concept might bend during shooting, the film must end with the death of either the macho or one of his victims. Either way, the macho would be shown to be someone feeding off other people’s misery and be ruined. Unlike Hannaford with his film in Other Wind, Welles always had this goal in mind. In this script, he seemed to think the death would be Dale, but this might have changed had he mulled the project over or worked with his actors. Indeed, as with most early drafts of his scripts, the fragments of Beasts are written with dialogue only, Welles deciding the context for the exchange later (p. 119).

Dialogue sections between some of the reporter-biographer characters are cited in Riambau's book (pp. 120, 122). People like Ossie are among them, as are characters that disappeared when the film was reset in the US: Mimsey, Turner Baldwyn [sic], Slim, and Rivers. On p. 120, Slim calls Hannaford “Daddy” only for Ossie to retort, “Don’t be morbid.” On p. 122, Mimsey, Rivers, and Turner talk about how Dale is planning on making a film with a colleague named “Claude”, but it’s all a secret. Though Baldwyn has said that neither Jake nor Dale can talk about their films, Rivers speculates that they’re both about bullfighting. This is so obvious once it’s brought up that Turner is embarrassed:

TURNER: “I feel like an idiot.”
RIVERS: “That’s show business” (p. 122).

Riambau's book includes a couple of speeches by Hannaford, one about bullfighting and the feria, and another about Dale himself:

I personally breathed into his lungs the ever marvelous breath of life... He had gone that night to a 'party', a wild 'party' ... really wild ... I knew all that before even his name ... Did he really want to die when he started swimming towards the sun that appeared on the horizon? I was sure he could not go back, that he could not turn back to that dirty place ... Had I discovered something about him in that orgy, something that he thought he could not live with? There must be a strange caprice in it. Always have I been well free of monsters. (p. 120)

These fragments are too short to be evaluated and I do not have access to Cobos’s book — yet. In any case, the UMich fragments shift this entire story from Spain to France. Riambau notes that with the failure of Francesco Rosi’s The Moment of Truth, a film about bullfighting in Spain (which also inspired Sacred Beasts), Welles became disillusioned with the idea of having the film centered around bullfighting by February-March 1966; at the end of 1968, he and Oja Kodar began to outline Other Wind (p. 123). Given this evidence, the fragments at the UofM seem to come from some time between 1966 and 1968.

Sources:

Maysles, Albert. “Orson Welles in Spain” [documentary featurette]. 1963. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gcp9-_bfI.

Riambau, Esteve (1993) Orson Welles: Una España Immortal. Filmoteca Valenciana, 1993.

[JMcBride]

At least a vestige of the bullfighting idea remained right up to the start of shooting. I was
told that we were going to Tijuana on Sunday, August 23, 1970, to begin shooting in
a bullring. But when I arrived at Welles's house in Los Angeles that morning, I was told that due to some
edict about taking cameras across the border, Welles was dropping the whole bullfighting
angle. Instead that day we shot scenes in the house and in the car. I was surprised
that he dropped the bullfighting angle that quickly. It was a sign of his ability to
change on a moment's notice and come up with new solutions.

[nickleschichoney]

At least a vestige of the bullfighting idea remained right up to the start of shooting. I was
told that we were going to Tijuana on Sunday, August 23, 1970, to begin shooting in
a bullring. But when I arrived at Welles's house in Los Angeles that morning, I was told that due to some
edict about taking cameras across the border, Welles was dropping the whole bullfighting
angle. Instead that day we shot scenes in the house and in the car. I was surprised
that he dropped the bullfighting angle that quickly. It was a sign of his ability to
change on a moment's notice and come up with new solutions.

Very interesting. The bullfighting element is present in Other Wind and in the UMich fragments of the France-set Sacred Beasts, but it's not as central as it was in pre-1966 versions of the project. However, it makes sense that Welles considered shooting some scenes at the Mexican border city and then writing some material around it at that stage, when he reset the film in and around southern California. Maybe he thought the third act of Other Wind would move to a bullfighting ring.